About Landscape Conservation Cooperatives

Protecting natural and cultural resources is essential to sustaining our health and quality of life. We, along with fish and wildlife, rely on clean water and the benefits of having healthy rivers, streams, wetlands, forests, grasslands, and coastal areas in order to thrive.

Cooperative conservation has been a priority for the Department of the Interior since the early 2000s. Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs)  were established to provide science capacity and technical expertise for meeting shared natural and cultural resource priorities.

Today, the network of 22 LCCs are changing how we think about, plan, and act upon collaborative conservation issues in a way that goes beyond boundaries to help the places we love and the natural and cultural resources our communities depend on thrive for generations to come. By building a network that is collaborative, non-regulatory, adaptive, and grounded in science, LCCs are working to ensure the sustainability of our economy, land, water, wildlife, and cultural resources.

Each LCC brings together federal, state, and local governments along with Tribes and First Nations, non-governmental organizations, universities, and interested public and private organizations. These LCC collaborative partnerships leverage resources, share scientific expertise, fill needed science gaps, identify best practices, and prevent duplication of efforts through coordinated conservation planning and design. Moreover, LCCs help stimulate coordinated action to effect long-term change. 


Landscapes capable of sustaining natural and cultural resources for current and future generations.


A network of cooperatives depends on LCCs to:

  • Develop and provide integrated science-based information about the implications of climate change and other stressors for the sustainability of natural and cultural resources;
  • Develop shared, landscape-level, conservation objectives and inform conservation strategies that are based on a shared scientific understanding about the landscape, including the implications of current and future environmental stressors;
  • Facilitate the exchange of applied science in the implementation of conservation strategies and products developed by the Cooperative or their partners;
  • Monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of LCC conservation strategies in meeting shared objectives;
  • Develop appropriate linkages that connect LCCs to ensure an effective network.